1. Get rid of the marketing goons. All they will tell you is how to follow the crowd. Making your own path will be harder and slower to success, but eventually more valuable and rewarding.
2. Get out there and live. Dive into an area of expertise. Only once you have achieved genuine proficiency and a depth of specialized knowledge will you understand that part of the universe well enough to think of a truly great innovation.
3. Forget money. Make something that is great and useful to you. Eventually, the money will come. If it doesn’t, it means you weren’t lucky enough, and that’s life. You still made something great, and that’s better than wasting your life chasing money and fame by doing something stupid.
4. Start with the small problems and work your way up. Theranos failed because they tackled a huge problem (low volume blood analysis) before solving all the small problems along the way.
5. Try to do something useful. If you prioritize making money over making something worthwhile, you are just going to accelerate our destruction. Remember, a study recently showed 98% of bugs in a rain forest had gone. If that doesn’t sound like the end of days to you, you need to wake up. A dying planet doesn’t need another way to trade fucking derivatives. If you’re going to destroy the planet to do it, it better be worth it.
6. Remember the big ideas. Curing disease, reversing aging, understanding protein folding, and figuring out what the unknown 95% of the universe is made of. If you spend you life on these problems, it won’t be wasted, even if you are not particularly successful. And you don’t have to chase a big idea to notice clues along the way, or to make the tools that others can use to get further along a meaningful path.